It is the time of year when we are talking about trends for the new year and I think when it comes to cloud computing one trend that stands boldly above the rest is –
Native Cloud Applications. So, what is a native cloud application?

Let’s take a look at what type of applications are currently running on the cloud… You don’t have to look too hard to realize that these are exactly the same applications that have been developed for a decade to run either locally or at traditional datacenter:

Scalability often means crude load balancing over multiple instances of the same application running on several images

Services provided by cloud providers are rarely used and not taken a full advantage of since they are not readily available during development that happens outside the cloud

Any work with or deployment on a specific cloud provider means a cloud lock-in that is only compounded by the fact that all current vendors require all-or-nothing approach when it comes to hosting your application

They are massively parallel, i.e. they are built so that they can scale on a much finer scale on cloud’s on-demand distributed infrastructure – like ability to scale an individual method call in Java code, for example

They take full advantage of native services available in the cloud like S3 and SimpleDB from AWS

They are developed using a cross-cloud paradigm allowing you to seamlessly develop and run your application across multiple cloud providers utilizing one virtualized cloud spanning your workstation, local co-lo or datacenter and several external cloud providers

To help develop and run Native Cloud Application a new breed of software middleware is required. With the release of GridGain 2.1 – Open Cloud Platform last month we’ve started on the road to create a perfect runtime and development platform for Native Cloud Applications. GridGain 3.0 scheduled for Q2-Q3 this year will largely complete our vision of what open cloud platform for Native Cloud Application should be.